Meevl Rewards Employees for Sharing Company News Online

Generally speaking, at larger companies there’s often a small team, department or single individual responsible for sharing approved content on social media streams and devising strategy around what gets promoted on social channels and what doesn’t. But Slovakian startup meevl is hoping to change that with a new web-based platform launching in private beta to help encourage all of a company’s employees to take part – and to reward them when they do.

Meevl recently graduated from Nashville-based accelerator JumpStart Foundry, which also provided it with an initial $15,000 in funding. The company is now back in Slovakia, and CEO and co-founder Vladimir Tucek told BetaKit in an interview that from here, the focus will be on recruiting businesses to get on to the platform and help the company prepare for public, paid launch.

What companies get when they sign up is an incentivized social media sharing platform, complete with a gamified rewards system that helps companies encourage positive sharing behavior and get everyone, social media expert or not, in on the action.

“Currently, social media management platforms are mostly for small teams, where members watch their company’s presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and so on,” Tucek said. “Even if it’s a really huge company, [social media] is managed by a very small team, and all content is produced by that team. We’d like to involve more employees in this process.”

To get more employees involved, meevl allows administrators to assign rewards for sharing specific content on social networks. Employees can suggest things to share, and also draw from a pool of approved content to earn credits which can be redeemed for rewards. Companies set their own rewards, but meevl suggests real-world gifts and prizes, like for instance a fully paid dinner for two, or even a getaway trip for the team with the most points at the end of a financial year.

Of course, there’s an obvious downside to encouraging this kind of distributed approach to social media management; the more people you involve, the more difficult it becomes to stay on message. Companies, especially large ones, often put a lot of emphasis on making sure that employees don’t tweet or publish to Facebook any content that may become controversial or that strays from their approved corporate messaging. Tucek acknowledged that that can be a problem, but he also says that meevl is designed to address that issue.

“Companies will still have control, because employees suggest what they want to post about and you still have one person approving what will be shared and what won’t,” he said. “Also if a social media manager finds something especially interesting among the suggested sharing content, he can highlight it so that other employees will know that’s something to be shared.”

Since meevl is about guided social sharing, and uses so-called “Challenges” to organize content and make sure that employees are staying on message, and only rewards them if they do, it should be able to avoid some of the missteps of just opening the floodgates and making all staff independent social media stars. Plus, there’s the fact that employees are already spending a lot of time on Facebook and other social networks, which means that providing potential ways for companies to refocus some of that time back to profit-driving activities could be a very good thing.

Meevl’s competition will come more from established productivity management tools like Socialcast, where administrators can reward employees for doing positive things, but its focus on social media activity specifically, paired with an emphasis on real-world rewards, should help set it apart. And meevl is also likely anticipating the natural progression of things anyway; companies can’t keep social media channels contained completely to individuals and small departments, so they might as well embrace change and find ways to guide the sharing habits their employees already have.